Ron Left: Shadow Series

The Shadow Series, and closely related Escalator Series, are part of an on-going commitment to the reinvention of abstraction. Although the works are connected to and informed by modernist painting and minimalism, they explore a basic premise of an inherent connection between things, and a denial of a self-contained, hermetic form of abstract painting.

Numerous devices are employed in the paintings to undermine the borders between things, to bleed out of the edge and the frame, and to collapse the distinction, for example, of the disciplines of painting and photography. Photographic and painting processes are not merely juxtaposed but develop a dynamic between the two (and between image and surface) so that they start to define and re-define each other. The photographic image begins to look like drawing or painting, and the abstract surfaces and surface marks and visual noise are intimately connected to an actual presence. The photographic image becomes gestural and abstract and there is a flow between these disciplines.

RON LEFT